It's possible that dealing with my many grandchildren has led me to favor patient explanation rather than insults. How would they ever learn manners otherwise? ;-)

I encounter a distressingly large number of people in forums that seem to have missed the benefits of a patient grandparent. Perhaps that's why I rather like Twitter - it's hard to squeeze off a really nasty insult in 140 characters. *shrugs*

Strange, that. In my own experience, arbitrary character count limitations rather tend to lead people (myself included) to more simplistic thinking, and thus to more insulting behaviour. Because it takes less precious characters to call someone a moron than to patiently and politely explain what they did wrong and why it was wrong.

Either that, or people start to use xtrmly abrvt wrdng to sqz a few xtr chrs in, in a way reminding of some greybeard programmers who write code as if variable names were still limited to 8 characters.

I still remember the joy of entering the unlimited text era on cellphones a few years ago, and finally being able to type (almost) as much as I like in a text without worrying about how much it will cost. Why one would want to go back to such stringent character count limitations, when technological considerations can no longer justify it, is beyond me.